


Shatterpoint

by MadameHyde



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Angst, Angst and Feels, Canon-Typical Violence, Caspar von Bergliez is is very sad, Character Study, F/M, Losing side, Pining, Post-Timeskip Battle at Gronder Field (Fire Emblem)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-11
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:46:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27513292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MadameHyde/pseuds/MadameHyde
Summary: The Black Eagles’ backs are nearly breaking under the weight of Edelgard’s war, and it isn’t going well. Gronder Field promises to turn the tide--if only Caspar believed it.
Relationships: Caspar von Bergliez/Hilda Valentine Goneril
Comments: 13
Kudos: 35





	Shatterpoint

**Author's Note:**

  * For [roxyryoko](https://archiveofourown.org/users/roxyryoko/gifts).



Edelgard’s war was dragging, and so was morale.

Caspar couldn’t tell you the last time he’d had a hot meal or a mattress, let alone a bath. All along the Adrestian coast, they clashed with Faerghus’ forces, and all along the Eastern border, the Alliance pushed back in delicate, politicking ways.

In many ways, the Black Eagle Strike Force was more fucked alive than dead, and the irony was not lost on them. Dorothea and Linhardt tended to the wounded with pursed lips, while Hubert spent most of his days hunched over sheets upon sheets of parchment full of numbers that refused to play nice.

Her army was starving, bankrupt, and rapidly veering towards “total loss” if something didn’t shift soon, and everyone knew it.

_ Gronder Field,  _ Edelgard urged.  _ Things will be different when we win at Gronder Field. _

If nothing else, Caspar mused, it was Adrestia’s breadbasket so at least they might finally get something half decent (and not full of maggots or worse) to eat. It was a mediocre reason to march at best, though, and so Caspar’s dreams were filled with just as much strife as his waking hours. His stomach gnawed at him as they drew closer to the battlefield, and no one had any enthusiasm for much of anything, anymore.

He wondered, not for the first time, if he’d made a mistake in following Edelgard. Professor Byleth had recruited him to the Golden Deer House back when they’d all just been students at Garreg Mach, and he’d found he got on with the rambunctious Alliance crew like a house on fire. Raphael was so much fun to go head to head with in training, and Lysithea was just a joy to bother. He’d never had a little sister, and she seemed like a good one. Claude was wicked smart and not terrifying, like Dimitri or Edelgard (though Caspar would only admit that privately), and although Lorenz was strung out on honor and duty, Caspar knew how to handle that.

But then, there was Hilda.

At first, Caspar hadn’t known what to make of her. She constantly tried to get out of doing work, and had once somehow convinced him to help her clean out her room by having him lift the heavy bookcases and dresser so she could get underneath them. Claude always took her laziness in stride, and ribbed at her until she gave in. 

_ I’m a delicate flower!  _ She would always protest.  _ I can’t be on the front lines! _

Yet Caspar had watched her cleave through enough bandits to know that was a lie. She was beautiful, she was  _ powerful _ , and she constantly tried to downplay her own strength for… what?

He’d asked her once, right around when graduation should have been.  _ Why are you always talking bad about yourself?  _

And she’d tried to hedge around it, naturally, batting her eyelashes at him.  _ I don’t know what you’re talking about? _

And no matter how much he tried to impress upon her that she was just as much a battlefield terror as Claude, or himself, or her brother Holst, she refused to see it. She said she wanted to be left alone with her fashion and her tea parties, not charge into battle alongside a wyvern and disappoint everyone when she couldn’t do it.

_ Do what?  _ Caspar had asked.

She’d never given a real answer.

Not wanting to go into battle hadn’t stopped her from falling in love with the wyvern wyrmling Claude had given her for her birthday, that year. She began spending all her spare time in the stables with Marianne and little Laertes, until the girls became fast friends and the wyvern grew large enough to ride.

Caspar wasn’t sure when he’d fallen in love with her, either. It was probably somewhere between watching her care for her wyvern, bandage his wounds after yet another fistfight, and helping him with his tactics homework, but he couldn’t be sure. There had been lots of little moments like those .

All he knew was that watching the world fall around him was suffocating. He’d been friends with the Golden Deer, with the Blue Lions, and maybe--just maybe--if he’d gotten his shit together sooner, he wouldn’t have had to contemplate the possibility that he’d be facing Hilda on the battlefield, and she would have been beside him, instead. 

He couldn’t stomach the idea that he may have to kill her--or worse, she may have to kill  _ him. _

As the Black Eagles’ Strike Force arrayed themselves on Gronder Field, Caspar wondered, absently, where she was now. Claude had been playing everything extremely close to the vest, and it was rumored he was reaching out to Faerghus for help. There were also rumors that King Dimitri had lost his mind entirely, so Caspar wasn’t sure what the truth was, there.

Was she holding Fodlán’s locket with Holst? Was she leading Claude’s other task forces, or was she his bodyguard or something? Was she on the back lines, cooking or mending things instead of front and center with Freikugel?

(Worst of all, was she even still alive?)

“Steady, now,” Hubert called across the field. “Steady.”

Caspar scraped a whetstone across his battle axe as Bernadetta scurried up the fort to man the ballista. She was such a timid creature; he wondered if she wanted to duck and run. He sort of did, mostly because they were going to lose this war, and it was becoming rapidly apparent, even to him.

But Caspar never ran from a fight, so here he was.

They spotted the blue banners of the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus mere moments before the golden banners of the Leicester Alliance crested the horizon, and his heart jumped into his throat.

“The Alliance is here?” Petra murmured from atop her wyvern.

Linhardt worried the cuffs of his sleeves. “It was supposed to just be Faerghus.”

“I think,” said Caspar, putting his whetstone away, “we’ve been lied to.”

Edelgard called for the first strike, and after that, it was all chaos.

Caspar smashed into the enemy ranks with confident ease. He wasn’t graceful, and he wasn’t dextrous, but he was their tank--he wasn’t meant to be. He took the brunt of blows meant for Dorothea and Linhardt, put himself boldly and bodily between the enemy and his Emperor, and he was alright with that.

He caught an arrow in the shoulder at one point, and paused his onslaught just long enough to snap the shaft and keep going. _ Don’t ever pull an arrow out,  _ Linhardt had told him when the war began.  _ You’ll bleed out before I can get to you. _

It hurt, though. The arrowhead had struck deep, and it made swinging his axe laborious. Caspar could  _ feel  _ the wrongness of the metal in his shoulder, and it grated on him. Resisting the urge to pull at it was proving incredibly difficult, and that was before he stumbled on the sightless corpse of Raphael Kirsten.

It hit him like a warhammer to the gut. Raphael was the Golden Deer’s Caspar, the jovial one, the tank, the one who ate too much. And now he was dead, his body struck down by what appeared to be Hubert’s dark magic, judging by the scars.

Caspar fell to his knees, and suddenly the world went quiet around him.

_ “C’mon, Caspar!” Raphael called from the training room doors. “We’ll be late for dinner!” _

_ Breathing hard, Caspar had called back, “Be there in a few!” _

_ “Even Felix has gone to dinner!” Raphael had argued. “C’mon, your training will be here when you get back.” _

_ Caspar didn’t know how to articulate that he couldn’t just leave this unfinished. He had to  _ do something _ , or he would burst. He didn’t know how to articulate that his brother’s latest letter made him want to punch the smug bastard, didn’t know how to articulate that the whole fiasco with Professor Byleth and the man with the scorpion tattoo left him so angry he wanted to explode.  _

_ He didn’t notice when Rapahel left, either, only when someone else had taken his place. _

_ Someone distinctly pink-haired and much, much warmer. _

“Caspar!”

He blinked--once, twice, thrice--and suddenly memory-Hilda gave way to the woman herself, and Caspar couldn’t breathe.

By this point in the battle, she was covered in blood and grime, just like he was. Her armor was ripped in places where she’d probably taken a lance to the ribs and to the thigh, and she dismounted shakily. Laertes was reaching out to him with his neck, trying to nuzzle Caspar like they were still in the Academy, still kids, still friends. Like there was no war standing between them.

But by the goddess, Hilda was still stunning.

“I don’t want to fight you,” she said, her voice nearly lost in the war’s din. “But I will if I have to.”

Despite his instincts screaming at him, Caspar didn’t raise his axe as he got to his feet. He couldn’t.

Hilda took that as encouragement, and kept going. “I just need to pick up Rapahel’s body, okay? I just…”

She broke, then, her shoulders caving in on themselves and her mascara streaking down her face.

“I just…”

Despite the death and bloodshed all around them, Caspar couldn’t stop himself from reaching out. His chest was caving in and his head was spinning in a hundred directions and he suddenly, desperately needed to  _ act. _

Hilda crumpled against him when he pulled her to his chest.

“You shouldn’t be hugging me,” she said, even as she brought her arms around him and squeezed.

Caspar squeezed back all the more tightly. “Neither should you.”

She felt so warm, so small, so  _ right,  _ here in his arms, even in the middle of this Goddess-forsaken battlefield. The handful of letters they’d exchanged before the war truly kicked off paled in comparison to actually having her  _ here,  _ with him.

Where she belonged.

“I missed you,” Hilda muttered into his chest. “Why did you have to side with  _ her?” _

_ I’m so glad I’m from the Alliance. I had no idea Edlegard was so scary, and Dimitri seems totally different from before,  _ Hilda had said, once upon a time.  _ I wouldn’t bend the knee to either of them. _

Which begged the question--why did he?

_ She’s the Emperor _ was all he had.

It was so pale, so fragile. How far was he willing to go for a madwoman; how many meals would he miss; how many friends would he kill and not even stick around to see buried? How many more would Linhardt have to kill, when all he wanted to do was heal and study? How many more monsters would Bernadetta see in the shadows? How much more would Hubert’s hands corrode from his dark magic, and how much deader would Dorothea’s eyes grow?

_ No. _

It had to end.

And Caspar wanted to see it.

“Take me back with you.”

Hilda was so startled she let go of him. “What?”

Although his voice shook, it remained strong. “I’ll carry Raphael. You focus on Laertes.”

“Caspar…” Hilda was staring at him with a whole host of emotions he couldn’t place. “...are you deserting?”

“Yeah.” He barked a short, startled laugh. “Yeah, I think so.”

Despite everything, despite what it would mean, Hilda still asked, “Are you  _ sure?” _

He didn’t answer, just carefully hoisted Raphael’s body up and over his shoulder.

“Take me to Claude,” Caspar said. He tried to sound commanding, confident, assured.

To Hilda, though, he just sounded tired.

“Okay,” she said, quietly. “Okay.” 

She pressed a small kiss to his cheek before she re-mounted Laertes, and promise hung heavily in the air. Laertes took to the sky, his huge, black wings silhouetted against the smoke, and Hilda immediately swerved out of the way of a volley of arrows.

Caspar cast one last glance over his shoulder, and mentally said his goodbyes to Linhardt and Petra and Dorothea. He hoped he would see them on the other side.

And then he began to walk.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy belated birthday to the incomparable Roxyryoko! Hope you like hanging out in Caspar's head ;)
> 
> If you enjoyed the fic, come hang out on [ twitter! ](https://twitter.com/MadsHatter1)


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